Take time to take stock

By Peter
on Oct 9th, 2017
in Sarah's Blog

How often do you take stock of your marketing?

Most of us are guilty of pushing on to the next urgent job, allowing the maintenance tasks to slip further and further down the list. The summer holiday season gives most businesses a slight change of pace and for some some, willing volunteers on work placements. It makes it a great time to take a look at your marketing activity and be your own critical friend.

As I visit different organisations it is, more often than not easy to spot where the message has gone off track a tad. So, why don’t you take over the board room table and fill it with literature, press cuttings, social media chatter, web pages……..

Then ask yourself:
? How did we inform our target market about our business?
? What worked?
? What didn?t?
? Were our graphics coordinated and messages consistent?
? Who were our key audiences?
? What were our key messages?
? Were they the right messages and did they reach the right people
? What media coverage did we receive?
? Was it effective?
? Did we miss any opportunities?

Pretty quickly you will start to build a picture. Then see what your target audience thought. Ask them a few targeted questions, what their impression was of the marketing they saw, how you could improve. The same applies to your staff, their opinion counts, so don’t forget them and the internal communication tools.
If the internal message is a mismatch with the external one customers will pick up on it very quickly and that is damaging.

So make the most of the summer and take a look at your last year of marketing.